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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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I
remember vividly the elation of one of my oldest female friends when Bill
Clinton was elected president in 1992. She liked Bill, and she was an even
bigger fan of Hillary. She liked the modern nature of their marriage, that both
husband and wife worked but still managed to be such obviously committed
parents to their daughter. And my friend really liked that the Clintons considered Bill's political career a partnership. Most of all, my friend liked the
fact that people of our generation, people who had come of age in the late
1960s and early 1970s, had now risen to the highest level of national leadership.
My friend was a little more taken with the Clintons personally than was I, but
I largely shared her optimism. Bill and Hillary had indeed been forged in the
same fires of civil rights and Vietnam, had made their marriage in the midst of
an emerging women's movement. They had mourned the deaths of Martin Luther King
and Bobby Kennedy, and they had worked for George McGovern, just like I had.
These were people with whom I had things in common, people for the most part I
presumed I could count on to approach issues as I and so many members of my
generation would. Today, however, more than five years into Bill Clinton's presidency,
I am less confident about sharing attitudes central to his nature. And this
has little to do with what I have learned about the infamous nature of his
alleged sexual habits. Rather, it has to do with what I have learned about myself.

Twenty
years ago now I discovered my ca­pacity for naivete, I was raised the son of a Southern
Baptist minister. Ours was a teetotaling family and a teetotaling religion. My
parents did not teach me that the consumption of alcohol was a sin. They
laughed at the old Baptist canard that the wine Jesus drank was actually grape juice,
explaining instead that the lack of refrigeration in Biblical times required
the consump­tion of wine because grape juice would spoil. They advocated
abstinence from alcoholic beverages, they assured me, because it was a sound health
practice. And since they were my parents, I believed them. Moreover, I believed
that the families of all the Baptist boys and girls with whom I went to Sunday
School were teetotalers just like we were. And I believed that fact until I was
thirty years old, long after my Lutheran classmates at Valparaiso had
introduced me to the pleasures of a cold beer. In the late 1970s, however,
while in graduate school at UCLA, I became friends with a fellow student from Al­abama. He too was raised a Southern Baptist, and just like me, with his family he
attended worship services twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night. He
shared these details with me as we were drinking margaritas at El Cholo, our
favorite place in Los Angeles. I laughed that two Southern teetotalers like
ourselves had developed such a fondness for tequila and lime juice. But he
responded that his family had never practiced the Baptist prohibition on
alcohol consumption, nor had any of the other families with whom he went to
church. He presumed that genuine abstinence was practiced only by the clergy,
and so his family had an emergency hiding place for their liquor where it could
be quickly put out of sight should the preacher come to call.

I
thought all my naivete had been exposed that night. But it hadn't, not by a
longshot. Far more was exposed in the months after my fa­ther's death last year
when my mother revealed that all through my childhood he regularly drank at
social gatherings with his other friends in the Baptist ministry. But none of
these men (with the exception of that mighty iconoclast Will Campbell, who
never ratted them out) ever admitted publically even to their own children that
they liked a glass of wine or beer. Mine cer­tainly didn't, anyway. And as I
talked with my mother about my lost father, I felt a profound sense of being
the village idiot, the only one who believed that people meant what they
professed to mean. But my conversations with my mother were far more unsettling
than that. For she also revealed my father's long record of sexual indis­cretion,
dating back to the early days of their marriage. Yes, I was shocked. But I had
been shocked before, to learn of the dalliances of Bill Clinton's hero, John
Kennedy, or those of mine, Martin Luther King. Now, the list of unfaithful husbands
included my own father. And my sense of shock was dwarfed by my sense of
foolishness for believing that people adhere to the princi­ples they espouse.

I
had experienced this sense of foolishness previously. When I was a student at Valparaiso, I underwent a fairly common crisis of faith and personal identity. By the time
I was graduating from college, the non-violent idealism of Martin Luther King
had given way to the militarism of the black power movement and the armed revolutionary
rhetoric of the Black Panthers. The natural patriotism of my Southern rearing
had been eroded by the disastrous politics of an illegal war drowned in the
blood of atrocities like those at Mai Lai. But then, as I joined the throng of
young Americans in anti-war activism, I found myself confronted with people who
advocated violence in the name of peace. This inconsis­tency did not transform
me from dove into hawk, but it did give birth to a disillusionment that I'm not
sure I've ever overcome. I reflect on these things, my foolishness and my
disillusionment, as I reflect on two prominent films that have arrived on
movie screens this spring.

Fighting
the Power

I
was a senior at Valparaiso when America's disastrous intervention in Vietnam reached its crisis point. Richard Nixon ran for the presidency in 1968 as a peace
candidate with a secret plan to bring the war to a speedy conclusion, but in
May of 1970 he ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia. The war was widening, not
winding down. Our nation's campuses, hotbeds of anti-war activism for a half
decade, exploded. The rallying cry of young people across the country became,
"No more business as usual. Shut down everything." But instead of the
general strike we wanted as a tool to end the war, we got soldiers on campus.
And shortly, demonstrating students were being gunned down at Kent State and Jackson State. Student leaders at Valparaiso asked for a moratorium on classes,
to match the moratoria that had been called at campuses from Princeton to
Stanford. When school officials resisted, privately citing concerns about the
reaction of our conservative alumni, we called a rally and talked openly of organizing
a sit-in demonstration to occupy the administration building.

And
then for many of us the world changed. While we talked, someone set Kinsey Hall
on fire, and the conflagration spread to Bogart Hall next door, burning both to
useless shells. Musical instruments, works of art, several personal libraries
and at least one copy of a doctoral dissertation-in-progress were among the
many casualties. A nightwatchman who was inside the building barely escaped
with his life. I had been among the speakers at the rally who urged all our
actions to be non-violent, even non-violent against property. But because I had
been a speaker at the rally, I had the police at my door the next morning. I
was innocent of any crime, but I was threatened with charges of arson, inciting
to riot and conspiracy. I have never been so scared. And I have never forgotten
the grilling I endured that day. This week I recall that episode with
particular vividness because I have just seen Bruno Barreto's somber and in­sightful
Four Days in September.

Set
in Rio de Janeiro in 1969 and based on real events, Four Days in September is
the story of a student leader who is harassed for making speeches against his totalitarian
government. An aspiring young journalist, Fernando (Pedro Cardoso) lives in a
far worse world than the one I lived in during the same years. Brazil's military junta has suspended civil rights and abolished freedom of the press. When
police begin to ar­rest the leaders of student street demonstrations, Fernando
and his friend Cesar (Selton Mello), a seminarian, decide to join an
underground revo­lutionary group, the MR-8, dedicated to the restoration of
democracy. Almost immediately, however, these two young idealists come to recognize
the danger and the impotence of their situation. MR-8's first action is to rob
a bank (think Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty "Tanya" Hearst).
Cesar is wounded, captured and tor­tured. And because the junta controls the
media, the country doesn't even know that MR-8 ex­ists. In frustration,
Fernando proposes a far more daring operation: the kidnapping of Charles Burke
Elbrick (Alan Arkin), the American ambassador.

To
execute this plan, the MR-8 are joined by two seasoned revolutionaries from Sao
Paulo, Toledo (Nelson Dantas), a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and Jonas
(Matheus Nachtegaele), a young firebrand who instantly declares himself commander
of the unit and threatens to kill anyone who refuses to obey his every order.
Just as we saw in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom and Warren Beatty's Reds,
the revolutionary cell quickly embraces the notion that the goal of
democracy cannot be pursued via democratic means. Under Jonas' leadership the
ambassador is kidnapped, and the revolutionaries warn the government that they
will kill him if a group of political prisoners, including Cesar, are not released
within 48 hours. And so we see the swiftness of Fernando's descent from fervent
spokesman for freedom to bankrobber and prospective murderer. The especial
insanity of the MR-8's plan is revealed when Ambassador Elbrick turns out to be
a man of profound decency, a liberal who opposes the war in Vietnam and believes that the American government should withdraw recognition from all countries that
have overthrown democracy. As the clock ticks toward the 48-hour deadline,
Fernando knows all too well that he has summoned a circumstance by which he
must murder an innocent man who is actually his ideological ally. Meanwhile,
Elbrick tries to conduct himself in a way that sustains his dignity even as his
life hangs in the balance on a scale weighing forces completely beyond his
control.

It
would seem, then, that all our sympathies would lie with those opposed to the
MR-8, namely the state security forces trying to locate the revolutionaries'
hideout. But those very se­curity forces are the men conducting a campaign of
torture against opponents of the junta, opponents that include Fernando's
friend, Cesar. In this way Barreto achieves the magnificent effect of making us
feel two ways at once. We don't want the security forces to capture Fernando
and the other members of the MR-8 whom we understand to be merely misguided.
But we certainly don't want the violent and pitiless Jonas to force (as he's
pledged) Fernando to kill Elbrick. Where's the way out?

I
can nitpick at a handful of details in this film. The whole structure of the
MR-8 remains frustratingly unclear. It seems to exist prior to Fernando's
involvement, but no superstructure is ever made manifest. Toledo and Jonas make
their sudden appearance, but sent by whom we never learn, and they make clear
from the outset that they are not members of something so amateurish
as MR-8. Later, the sequence in which Fernando's lovely, sad-eyed comrade,
Renee (Claudia Abreu), seduces the head of Elbrick's security unit doesn't
really wash. That she could actually get him into bed as detailed seems un­likely
enough; that she could get him to reveal useful information seems purely
preposterous. Near the conclusion, once the location of the ambassador has been
ascertained by police, the actions of both the revolutionaries and state se­curity
officials seem inauthentic, too calm by the former, too casual by the latter.

But
on the whole, this is a film I admire a great deal. Throughout, it displays a
tremendous humanity. It disapproves of the methods of the MR-8 without ever
condemning its young membership. Comparably, it condemns the tactics of the
state police without losing sight of the humanity of its officers. In a
particularly insightful moment, the picture allows a security official to explain
why torture is unavoidable. His expla­nation is all the more chilling because
of the sense it makes within the context of his objectives. Thus, he can feel
bad about what he does, even as he defends it as necessary.

Elsewhere,
Four Days in September demonstrates how careful we must be not to let our
ideals cannibalize themselves. In America, some who started out as non-violent
opponents of the war in Vietnam drifted into the Weath­ermen who staged the
notorious "Days of Rage" or joined other organizations that blew up
research facilities or burned two buildings on the Valparaiso campus. In Brazil, as elsewhere, it led people to countenance murder as a political tool. Four Days
in September also illustrates how per­sonal agendas inevitably influence
the actions of organizations, even those organizations osten­sibly committed to
something as noble as overthrowing an illegal, oppressive government. There's
nothing ideological about Jonas' dislike of Fernando; it's purely personal. And
as Trotsky learned in the aftermath of Stalin's ascent, it's dangerous to
become the enemy of a man who has already convinced himself that killing is acceptable.

In
the end, this picture has the good sense to realize that it is wrestling with
problems to which there are no easy answers. We may come to care about the
individual members of the MR-8, but they are no heroes. Still, the ruthless government
they oppose is most certainly vil­lainous. The path taken by the MR-8 is the wrong
one. It targets innocent people. And such terrorism simply does not work. What
was achieved by blowing up the Pan American jet over Scotland? Or holding
Americans hostage in Iran? What has been accomplished by the count­less bombs
of the IRA? Barreto makes the ultimate pointlessness of such violence
absolutely clear, even as he sympathizes with the ultimate objectives of the
MR-8. In the end, as has been repeated by myriad revolutionary organizations elsewhere
since, the MR-8 is reduced to trying to gain freedom for their own incarcerated
membership, members captured in earlier terrorist operations, some, of course,
staged expressly in hopes of freeing still other captives. It's a vicious
cycle leading exactly nowhere. Bar­reto doesn't make clear why the junta
finally falls. But two decades later it does, just as the So­viet Union fell,
along with its iron-curtain allies in eastern Europe. And terrorism plays no
part whatsoever. Those whose frustration has ever led them to contemplate
violence ought ponder the desperate admission of Maria (Fernanda Torres), the
MR-8's original leader, that she would prefer to live in jail rather than die
for her revolutionary cause. For those of us blessed to reside in a country
with a more entrenched commitment to civil liberty, those who have been falsely
accused and those who haven't, it is im­perative that we recognize how fragile
our institutions and freedoms can prove. Our best protection against
terrorism is an unwavering commitment to justice.

Feeling
the Pain

The
issue of ends and means is raised in a different way in Mike Nichols' Primary
Colors, the story of a presidential candidate fighting scandals on his
march to the Oval Office. Based on Joe Klein's novel (officially authored by "Anonymous"),
Primary Colors tracks the efforts of a relatively obscure Southern
governor named Jack Stanton (John Travolta) to capture the 1992 Democratic
presidential nomination. The story is told through the eyes of a young black
polit­ical strategist named Henry Burton (Adrian Lester) who surprises even
himself when he agrees to join the Stanton campaign. Burton is a seasoned
political professional, but he aches to believe in something the way his famed
civil-rights-leader grandfather did, and he decides to place his faith in Jack
Stanton and Stanton's attractive, no-nonsense wife Susan (Emma Thompson). Stanton is a man unafraid of his own emotions. He cares about the plight of the common
American, the factory laborer who has lost his job, the single mother struggling to make
ends meet on a small salary, the fast food worker trying to scrape by on
minimum wage, the black barbecue cook trying to raise a decent family in the
trailer behind his shack, the functional illiterate owning up to his disability
and attending adult reading classes. And Burton is moved by Stanton's obvious
and genuine caring.

Unfortunately,
Stanton's gifts do not include that of self-control. He is brilliant and charismatic,
a hard man not to like. But in many ways he's like a precocious junior high
school student, smart but still childish. Stanton whines when he can't get
cable TV and smashes things when he can't get his way. Most of all, he's like a
horny teenager. His record of extramarital liaisons is so vast, his longtime
political associate Libby Holden (Kathy Bates) has been driven to the point of
despair. Now, just as Stanton begins to rise in the polls, Susan's former
hairdresser Cashmere McLeod (Gia Carides) comes forward to claim that she had a
long-term affair with Stanton and has taped conversations to document their
relationship. Later on, damaging rumors begin to circulate that Stanton has fathered a child by an unwed black teenager.

Burton
is disappointed to learn that Stanton is such a faithless husband (who seems to
love his longsuffering wife even as he routinely cheats on her), but Burton's
real crisis about working for Stanton doesn't come until he sees what Stanton
will do when he's backed into a corner, how for all his protestations about running
a positive campaign, he's willing to go negative when necessary. Worse,
perhaps, Burton is forced to witness how quickly Susan and Jack both can
fashion intellectual defenses. They don't invoke the phrase, but they both argue
that the ends justify the means.

It's
unfortunate that Jack and Susan Stanton are so obviously based on Bill and
Hillary Clinton, that Billy Bob Thornton's Richard Jemmons is James Carville,
that Cash­mere McLeod is Gennifer Flowers and so forth, for these connections
to a real President still besieged with sex scandals (even in the aftermath of
a federal judge's dismissal of the Paula Jones lawsuit) distract us from the
more probing things this picture wants to contemplate about the American political
process. The film obviously condemns the smear tactics that are now com­monplace
in campaigns from dog catcher to president. It raises serious questions about a
political ethic that places victory above all else, above such seemingly
higher priorities as honesty and fairness. And the picture worries about the
health of a political system that has become so ruthless as to intimidate those
without a white-hot ego-need to be in the spotlight, a political system that
by its very operation may drive away those far better able to lead than those from
among whom we finally have to choose.

Primary
Colors is successful purely as entertainment.
Elaine May's script is often howlingly funny. Some scenes are mostly
throw-aways, like the one in which Stanton makes a guest appearance on a
Florida talk show called Schmooze with Jews or another in which an at­tempt
to talk seriously with Susan about Jack's womanizing breaks down into
ridiculous confu­sion over a metaphor about being charged by a wild boar while
out hunting doves. Other mo­ments of comedy are more revealing, such as the scene
where Stanton, Jemmons and other aides sit around drunkenly discussing their
mothers while an impervious Susan tries to fashion strategy with Burton. When Burton wants to incorporate Stanton into the policy session, Susan observes
that "Jack will be in that mommathon for the rest of the night." We
laugh, but all the while we see both Jack's astonishing capacity for empathy
and Susan's relentless political focus and clear-headed grasp of her husband's
nature. And, of course, it's fun to think how much we're seeing inside the Clintons' relationship. Travolta's performance is practically an imper­sonation of our
current president. It's a very savvy impersonation because it manages to personalize
what we think we know about the public figure, a man so many of us find immensely
likable and infuriatingly irresponsible. Thompson's work isn't quite so closely
modeled on the public Hillary. The two don't look or sound the same. But
Thompson does most cer­tainly render Hillary's reputation for political toughness
and capacity for recovering from her husband's endless series (alleged anyway)
of infidelities.

The
standout performance is given here, though, by Kathy Bates. Her Libby Holden is
the film's quirky but ferocious conscience. Sexual license may be disgusting,
but it's not a fatal flaw in Libby's eyes. Libby stands ready to forgive almost
anything save trampling on the ideals of human decency that she presumes to
have shared with the Stantons since their youthful work together in the 1972
McGovern campaign. It is Libby who recognizes how Jack's indiscretions have
caused a lesion on Susan's soul, how Jack's ambition has clouded his view of
why he went into politics in the first place, and how together they have come
to see victory as the only way of justifying themselves, victory that must be
obtained at whatever cost. Libby is coarse, foul-mouthed, hard-nosed and
willing to play rough. But as the film goes along we come to see that she
stands for something whereas, she concludes, the Stantons finally stand only
for themselves. In this regard the film seems to veer abruptly away from its
own implications. Just as Libby seems to suggest that the Stantons have lost
their way (a premise with which the book ends), May's script reintroduces the
plausibility of Jack's argument that politics requires com­promise and that
great accomplishments require the power to act. Thus the film closes with an exertion
of Jack Stanton's compelling personality, the concession by Henry Burton that
his boss may be right, and a concerted attitude of hope. The Clintons will be
pleased by this at least.

Well
produced and enjoyable as this picture is, its end leaves me profoundly
uncomfortable, not because I'm Clinton hater—I'm not at all—but because it
finally seems to accept the Stantons' arguments that in today's climate of
dirty politics you have to be willing to get down in the mud if you seriously
want to win, and that to pursue worthwhile objectives you must first win. The
end of winning, therefore, justifies the means of dirty tactics. Mike Nichols
no doubt sees such an attitude as realistic. And I well remember that Jimmy
Carter (a man I admire rather more than Bill Clinton) told friends when he ran
for governor of Georgia, "Watch what I do when I'm elected, not what I say
to get elected."

Until
late in the 20th century, Americans were in the habit of idealizing the men
they elected President. George Washington was the "father of our
country," a man who "could not tell a lie." Thomas Jefferson
believed in "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Abraham
Lincoln was "the great emancipator." And so on. The press was a conscious
collaborator in the establishment and maintenance of presidential myth. They
willfully kept from the nation that Franklin Roosevelt was confined to a
wheelchair and that John Kennedy brought call girls into the White House.
Historians long knew the foibles of the men who led the nation, that Virginians
Wash­ington and Jefferson never escaped the taint of slaveholding, that Lincoln suffered frightful bouts of depression, that Woodrow Wilson continued to hold
office after becoming almost com­pletely incapacitated, that Roosevelt and Kennedy
were womanizers. But until the age of CNN, the average man remained ignorant of
the baser natures of his presidential heroes. Today we are limited in what we
know about our Presidents only by the revelations that the media will make
tomorrow.

In All
the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren says "There is one thing man cannot
know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him." I have
long been fascinated with that observation. Would we be better off not knowing
of our heroes' sins? Does the knowledge of their failed example weaken the resolve
of the rest of us to strive for virtue? I have cer­tainly thought I might be
better off not knowing the extent to which my father was unfaithful to the
rules he proclaimed from the pulpit and by which he taught me to live. But just
as I am about to embrace the blessedness of ignorance, I slam up against that
other of Penn Warren's observations: "The end of man is to know."
The knowledge we have already cannot be erased. Our he­roes stand before us
naked in their evident hypocrisy. And we will not go back to a time when the
reporters of CNN don't tell us more than we want to know about those who would be
president. So does that mean Jack and Susan Stanton are right: Nasty as it is,
the ends do justify the means?

I
find my answer in another favorite text, in the answer Joseph Heller provides
at the end of Catch-22 when Yossarian faces the logic that he can only
save himself from the evil machinations of Colonels Cathcart and Korn by endorsing
the machinations of Cathcart and Korn. "It's a way to save yourself,"
Yossarian's friend Major Danby proposes. "It's a way to lose myself,"
Yossarian responds. Yossarian seems faced with two unacceptable choices. So he
refuses to choose. He invents a third
way. He changes the rules. He acts not realistically but religiously. He strikes
out on a course paved purely by faith.

I
have already confessed my naivete. And now I embrace it. If I were realistic
I would know what is true and concede to it. But I would rather have faith
in what ought to be true. And so in­stead of recognizing that there's dirty
laundry in everybody's closet, I believe that a candidate of virtue and
principle exists and that America would relish, for instance, electing such a
person President. We can know the past. But we can make the future. And in the
future I would make, we would hold our public officials and the processes by
which they come office to the highest standard. It's a slippery slope if we
don't. For once we have conceded that the ends justify the means, we will find
those willing to employ means we think that we would not. And the nature of
the mud we have to wallow in will grow filthier still.